One of the ring’s most wanted fugitives was Ronald H. Stark, a New York chemist who mastered the synthesis of LSD and was credited with the Brotherhood’s development of extremely potent hashish oil. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Stark traveled for hashish supplies to the Bekaa Valley, where he allegedly befriended Musa Sadr, an Iranian-born cleric and champion of the dispossessed Shiites.

To move drugs from the region, Stark teamed up with members of the Sicilian Mafia who imported stolen cars into Palermo with hidden stashes of Lebanese hashish. He also moved loads into Italy aboard yachts. Stark, a master of ten languages, claimed at various times in his career to be Lebanese or Palestinian. He was a mystery man to federal narcotics agents, who never succeeded in prying his file from the FBI. In November 1972 authorities raided one of Stark’s drug labs in Brussels, leading to his indictment the following spring by a federal grand jury.

Finally, in 1975, Italian police were led by an anonymous call to arrest him in Bologna, where he was living with his family in a hotel under a false name with a fake British passport. Although suspected of murky involvement with Italian neofascists, secret service agents, and Palestinian terrorists, Stark by 1979 was a free man, released by a magistrate who declared, “Many circumstances suggest that from 1960 onwards Stark belonged to the American secret services.”